Measuring social media performance is an exciting part of a marketing campaign. For businesses who are planning to get maximum exposure of their brands, getting on a social media campaign on Facebook is still one of the more popular channels for marketers.
If you are looking into embarking on a Facebook social media campaign, here’s an easy guide on how to set, measure, and evaluate your campaign performance on this powerful social media channel.
But before we dive into the details, let us understand the two simple types of Facebook social media analytics – ongoing and campaign-focus analytics and the types of reach – paid and organic, and how each will determine your campaign.
What’s the difference?
Ongoing analytics provide an overview of your daily postings and how well your business or brand is perceived, the types of engagement, and conversations you build regularly. Campaign-focused analytics provide information from your campaign that can help you track your results, refine your strategy and measure your returns on investments.
The above analytics are also related on how you want to reach your customers i.e., either paid reach or organic reach.
Reach says the number of times your content is seen. The difference between reach and impression is that, if a person were to see a post three times, it is counted as three impressions but only one reach. The good thing about impression is that it shows you how viral your post is by the number of times a person sees it. The more times a person sees it, the higher chances of the prospect buying your product or service.
A paid reach refers to Facebook postings complimented by advertising dollar and the number of times your post is viewed as a result of paid ads. This is done by choosing your target audience according to demographics, area, age and interests on the Facebook campaign manager.
Organic reach is regular in nature using free tools and for marketers to build a social community to interact, share posts and respond to comments. It will show the total number of times your content is displayed online directly.
As a marketer, you will need to decide on the factors above for an effective campaign. Organic is ideal for community management and you do not need ad dollars to engage with your community. On the other hand, having a paid Facebook campaign will help get your messages to your right target audience more effectively.
Determine your SMART social media campaign goals
When working with clients on their Facebook social media campaigns, I always ask what their marketing objective is. Most times, they do not have much of an idea short of wanting exposure for their brand. This is where we come in to help them identify several goals depending on the intent of the campaign. These could be:
- Increase brand awareness.
- Generate more traffic to website.
- Generate more sales.
- Establish authority or thought leadership online.
- Run an online campaign or project.
- Communicate to their target audience.
At the same time, we also advise them on developing SMART goals i.e. it has to be specific, measureable, attainable,relevant and time specific.
Let’s take an example. You are a society who are looking to raise funds for a charity drive. Your marketing goal could simply be – to raise $20,000 in 6 months to support the renovation and curating daily activities of your women’s shelter.
Your social media campaign goals can be two prongs:
- Increase awareness of the organisation; and
- Increase click-through rate and website traffic to your donation campaign page.
Developing your metrics and measurements
Once the marketing goals are determined, you can develop metrics and measurements as follow:
Increase Facebook connections by 500 fans every month for 6 months. Facebook Insights can provide you the total number of fans you have acquired over a period of time.
Increase engagement by an average of 2% every month. To calculate % engagement, a simple calculation will be adding all your likes, comments, and shares divided by your total number of followers x 100%. Generally, according to Scrunch, a 1% – 3% engagement is considered good.
Increase website traffic to 1000 per week by posting and promoting relevant call-to-action posts and blogs on Facebook 5 times a week. To measure, use Google Analytics to view your page views, number of visitors from your social media campaign and the traffic to your donation page. These are good indicators of an excellent social media campaign and added with good SEO, it is one of the biggest drivers of your campaign effectiveness.
Having simple performance metrics can help you determine if the campaign fits the channel. You can also see how you compare with your competitors with similar campaigns on your Facebook Insights page.
Reporting your campaign performance
There isn’t a fixed number of reports you must generate to measure the performance. It can vary from weekly, monthly, quarterly, or at the end of the campaign. Regardless of the frequency, it would be best to track your metrics regularly. It will be even more exciting when you see the data improve over a period of time. For reporting purposes, include simple graphs or visuals for easy reference.
Audit and Evaluate
Conducting regular audits during your campaign can help assess areas that went well and areas that need improvements. Similarly, reviewing the total performance at the end of the campaign can determine if you met your ROIs. Some of the questions that you need to ask are; what were the comments from the ground? Could the website performance be better optimised? Was the donation page easy to use? Did you spread your campaign too wide or too narrow? Consider all these and find ways to improve on your next campaign.
Setting a targeted yet straightforward social media marketing campaign goals and metrics can help you achieve a more purposeful campaign and reach optimum KPIs. Social media measurements should be a serious matter. If you do not know how to set and use them to your advantage, consider engaging a social media agency to work with you.
